Contract electronics manufacturer Wistron Corp (緯創) last week said that it plans to purchase land in Vietnam, as the company continues to gradually shift production to Taiwan, India and the Philippines to diversify risk.
The 232,087.74m2 lot the company aims to secure is in the Dong Van III Industrial Zone in Ha Nam Province in northern Vietnam, Wistron said in a regulatory filing.
The transaction would total 337.4 billion dong (US$14.6 million), Wistron said.
The company did not provide additional details on the purchase, which remains subject to approval by the board of directors at a meeting next month.
Wistron, an assembler of Apple Inc’s iPhones, also manufactures notebook computers, PCs, tablets, game consoles, servers, monitors and LCD TVs for clients on a contract basis.
Wistron might build a factory to produce information technology-related products in Vietnam, the Chinese-language United Evening News reported on Wednesday, without citing sources.
The company might initially focus on displays and expand to laptops, the report said.
Credit Suisse Group AG’s equity research team said in a report on Wednesday that Wistron’s latest round of spending in Vietnam is aimed at providing an alternative option for its key US notebook computer clients in the long term, as it aims to start mass production beginning late next year or 2021.
In addition, the Vietnam location might offer better logistics and labor compared with its Philippine site, which could help improve the company’s performance margin in the long term, Credit Suisse said.
Wistron chairman Simon Lin (林憲銘) previously said that, in response to the US-China trade dispute, the electronics industry would shift production out of China to mainly Southeast Asia, but firms would not focus on a certain country or region and it would also be difficult to form industrial clusters such as those in China’s Kunshan or Chongqing.
Wistron also has manufacturing facilities in Mexico and the Czech Republic to support server production, but the company’s production remains largely based in China.
Other Taiwanese contract electronics manufacturers — such as Compal Electronics Inc (仁寶電腦), Quanta Computer Inc (廣達電腦), Pegatron Corp (和碩), Inventec Corp (英業達) and Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) — that have plants in China have also been shifting some of their production to Taiwan, India, Southeast Asia and the US to avoid high US tariffs imposed on products made in China.
Compal, for instance, has completed setting up and expanding capacity in Taiwan and Vietnam to sufficiently meet demand for notebook shipments to the US.
Quanta has focused on Taiwan and Thailand, and Inventec on Taiwan and Malaysia to diversify their supply chains, Credit Suisse said.
This week’s undoing of the TerraUSD algorithmic stablecoin and its sister token, Luna, has ramifications for all of crypto. First, there is the immediate impact: The rapid collapse of a once-popular pair of cryptocurrencies sent a ripple effect across the industry, contributing to plummeting coin prices that wiped hundreds of billions of market value from the digital-asset market and stoked worries over the potential fragility of digital-asset ventures. Then there are the knock-on effects. In addition to delivering punishing losses to individual users and investment firms, the spectacular failure of a market darling like Terra threatens to have a cooling effect
China’s biggest chipmaker has cut its outlook for the second quarter, joining a growing list of manufacturers warning about the fallout from lockdowns aimed at containing the country’s worst COVID-19 outbreak in two years. Semiconductor Manufacturing International Co (SMIC, 中芯) estimates a month-long lockdown in Shanghai could spur component shortages and logistics tangles, and erase about 5 percent of its output in the second quarter. “We are trying our best to mitigate the impact on product delivery,” SMIC Chairman Gao Yonggang (高永崗) told analysts on a call yesterday morning. “We are still assessing the actual impact as many suppliers restart their
DISRUPTIONS: The war in Ukraine, China’s lockdown measures, rising interest rates and inflation have thrown a wrench into business plans made years in advance Samsung Electronics Co is talking with foundry clients about charging as much as 20 percent more for making semiconductors this year, joining an industry-wide push to hike prices to cover rising costs of materials and logistics. Contract-based chip prices are likely to rise around 15 percent to 20 percent, depending upon the level of sophistication, people familiar with the matter said. Chips produced on legacy nodes would face bigger price hikes, while new pricing would be applied from the second half of this year, they said, adding that Samsung has finished negotiating with some clients and is in discussions with others. Samsung’s decision
material SHORTAGE: Even as workers are about to return, Quanta lacks operating supplies, while Pegatron reported its lowest revenues in 11 quarters, the companies said Taiwan’s major Apple Inc supplier cut its outlook for the second quarter, joining a growing list of manufacturers warning about the fallout from lockdowns aimed at containing China’s worst COVID-19 outbreak in two years. Quanta Computer Inc (廣達電腦), which assembles MacBooks, expects a 20 percent quarterly fall in notebook shipments and a squeeze on margins this quarter due to the lockdown, a company representative said on Friday during an earnings call. The impact from supply chain disruptions could last until the end of the year, she said. The company’s Shanghai factory has been operating under tight restrictions since the middle of last month,